A friend recently
commented that there is a lot of great information available in blogs
but who has the time to read them? Time is precious and in short supply.

RSS
and Atom
are designed to address this issue. They allow us to track more
information in less time. Since they are extremely similar, we’ll
focus on RSS. A “RSS feed” encapsulates what’s new in a blog or website,
and an “aggregator” or “feed reader” lets a user easily and quickly
check for new content of interest.

RSS stands for
“Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” and RSS is a format
for summarizing new web content.A RSS feed will typically have a
list of what’s new on a website. Each item has a title, a description,
and a link to the website where the item appears.For a blog, the items will be the most
recent posts. An item’s “description” might be its first paragraph or
even the entire post. For example my blog’s
RSS feed contains the title, first paragraph, and a link, for each of my
last ten posts.

RSS is used not
only by blogs but by traditional websites as well. For example, The New
York Times, Reuters, Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal, National Public
Radio, The US Department of State and The Washington Post all have RSS
feeds. Many sites have multiple feeds, e.g. The New York Times has feeds
for arts, automobiles, books, business, etc. which parallel their
content. Even some retailer’s websites have RSS feeds that show what new
merchandise they have.

The following screenshot shows the Bloglines
feedreader. On the left hand side we see the feeds that are subscribed
to. The ones in bold have new items – changes we haven’t looked at yet.
The number in parentheses that immediately follows each bold feed name
is the number of new items. Displayed in the main screen is the blog
Schneier on Security,
which shows two new items.

Since
many websites, including blogs, depend on advertising for revenue,
advertisements are starting to appear in RSS feeds.

The following
screenshot shows the popular Boing Boing
blog viewed from Bloglines. Note
the small advertisement for “Parts and Accessories for Harleydavidson”
in the middle of the page. It’s actually part of the RSS feed!

This is
a small look at RSS. RSS is more than just a mechanism to see what’s new
on a website. RSS is a communication mechanism web sites can use to
distribute content outside of browsers.
It’s both a publishing channel for announcing changes of what’s new to
users as we’ve seen, and a syndication channel which allows other sites
to easily find and access new material.

RSS and Atom feeds are extremely common
today in part because they are automatically implement by most blogging
software. The use of feedreaders is not as common, but in the near
future feedreaders will be as popular as email clients and web browsers
are today.